The SANTA project (students against nicotine and tobacco addiction): Using community-based participatory research to reduce smoking in a high-risk young adult population

Students Against Nicotine and Tobacco Addiction (SANTA) is an action research project that engages local medical and mental health providers in partnership with students, teachers, and administrators in the Minneapolis/St Paul Job Corps community to reduce on-campus smoking. In this article, we describe how the initiative has endeavored to better understand the causes of students' smoking behaviors; changed the campus environment in ways facilitative to stress-management and boredom-reduction; revised the manners in which smoking cessation and support services are conducted; and sustained the project following the discontinuation of its start-up grant. Evaluative efforts across several cohorts of students in time show that smoking rates decrease significantly with prolonged exposure to SANTA interventions.